Europe gets its own version of Tyrannosaurus rex

Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, watch out&colon; there’s a new predator in town. Palaeontologists have discovered a previously unknown dinosaur, which may have been Europe’s largest land predator during the Jurassic period. Called Torvosaurus gurneyi, it was about 10 metres long and weighed in at around 4 tonnes.

The first fossilised bones were found in Portugal’s Lourinhã Formation in 2003, but at first they were thought to be from a Torvosaurus tanneri, remains of which had been found only in North American up until that point. It is not unusual to find the same dinosaurs in Europe and North America, as the continents were once joined.

Now close examination of an upper jaw and vertebra suggests the Portuguese dinosaur was a separate species. “We put it all together and thought, ‘Hold on, this is not actually the same thing as in North America’,” says Octávio Mateus of the New University of Lisbon in Caprica, Portugal.

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T. gurneyi‘s name is a nod to James Gurney, author of the Dinotopia series of illustrated books. This toothy monster seems to have been a few metres longer than its contemporary Allosaurus fragilis, which also lived in Portugal.

At first glance, T. gurneyi looks a lot like the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. But it is smaller and more slender. T. gurneyi also has blade-like teeth that could cut through flesh, while T. rex had banana-shaped teeth, more suited to crushing bones.

Crucially, T. gurneyi lived in the Jurassic, 80 million years before T. rex. “When the first T. rex walked on land, this was already a fossil,” says Mateus.